Meetings

Would you like to build massively parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant, cross-platform, easily maintainable systems with less code and look cool doing it? If so, the opensource programming language Erlang has some real sweet spots for you. If you're unfamiliar with Erlang you may be surprised to learn how battle tested it is: Facebook's chat backend, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, GitHub's backend and Amazon's SimpleDB are all written in Erlang, and every phone call you make is likely helped along by some Erlang somewhere.

What's a lightning bowl? It's a mix between lightning talks (where you bring your own short talk), and a fishbowl (roundtable disucssion style). So, bring your own discussion topic, and we'll discuss several of them for 20-30 minutes each.
One topic we already thought of is: Change Mother $^%#er, Do You Speak It?

Join us as we host William Steele, maker of his own MakerBot Cupcake CNC. In this session, Bill will discuss the history, construction and usage of his MakerBot Cupcake CNC. You'll see how you can use one of these fantastic homebrew CNC 3D Printers to construct anything you can imagine. You'll also learn how you can utilize the Thing-A-Verse to find, create and share your own ideas with others. 3D Rapid Prototyping is a fast growing segment of the homebrew space... here's your chance to see what all the fuss is about!

Join us this month for a discussion about mobile web development! We'll discuss the whys, the whats, and the hows. This will be a combination talk and fishbowl (or other format) discussion. As always, pizza and networking are at 5:30 and the presentation is at 6PM.

We're trying something new this month - a lightning bowl! Calm down, Zeus, it's not literally a bowl of lightning that you get to throw at people. It's a lightning talk fishbowl. In other words, bring your own fishbowl topic. So come on by and we'll discuss whatever people want to discuss in a fishbowl format. As always, pizza and networking are at 5:30 and the lightning bowl starts at 6 PM.

Note: we're at the same alternate location as last month.
Come join us for some great presentations! First, we've got Alex continuing his series of Git lightning talks. Then Sasha will be presenting on mobile app design from a developer's perspective. Finally, Dean will talk to us about code contracts in C# 4.
As always, pizza and networking is at 5:30 PM, and the presentations start at 6 PM.

Join Michael Brown as he demonstrates a forgotten approach to software design. In this session, we will discuss a fusion of techniques to help developers discover a richer model of a problem domain and apply that model both for development as well as requirements gathering.
Learning this technique will help you become more confident in speaking with stakeholders and help you identify unspoken requirements that the experts might not realize are there.
The topics we will cover include:

We all use different patterns all the time, let's talk about them together. The idea is we'll have several different speakers, each talking about a different design pattern along with some code (mostly code).
If you'd like to contribute, and speak about your favorite pattern, just let us know!
Current lineup:

*** The meeting is still on, despite unpleasant weather. Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Professional certification is the best way to show folks what you know and to market yourself as a competent engineer.
Professional certification is a joke, and doesn't give any indication what someone knows, only that they've paid for a course, or used the right answers on a test.
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The core of your application is not twiddling bits to make pretty pictures on a screen. It is about doing business things with business objects. Domain Specific Languages allow you to program in a way that make those business objects dance, like sugar plum fairies. We'll cover how DSLs separate concerns and allow for clearer communication with stakeholders. Also covered, how to implement internal (DSLs in your code) and external (DSLs that are parsed) DSLs.

MongoDB is one of an emerging class of data stores that is part of the NoSQL movement. It mixes the ability to have a rich data model and rich querying, with the flexibility of schema-free development and horizontal scalability of some of its NoSQL peers. I'll give a brief overview of the system, and show some code and a couple interactive demos to demonstrate the power and simplicity of working with MongoDB.

TDD is tough and can be a bear to actually get started practicing.
Phil Japikse (@skimedic) is going to host a Dojo for us so we can practice our TDD skills.
Come prepared to get up and write a test or two, and feel free to bring your laptop and follow along as well.

Our software has become more and more complex. Managing all the details and how to wire all your objects together in a flexible manner that enables testing and rapid development becomes increasingly difficult, almost prohibitively so.

The only constant in life is change. How do we prepare for change? Should we? In this session, I will go over changes relating to the smallest unit in our code base up into our careers. What does DRY really mean? When is too much YAGNI too much? When is it not enough? Should I change where I work or change where I work? The intention of this session is to open ourselves to change, understand how to make the change we would like to see and how to be the change we want to see in the world. This session is a frank and open discussion of software craftsmanship, career building and the nature of existing in the world of software development.

NEW LOCATION! See the details below!!
We all want to create the perfectly-designed systems, who doesn't? But unfortunately, this is not always a reality. We want to spend an extra week to make sure a certain module is nice and tidy, but you simply cannot afford a week delay to the deadline to do this. What do you do? You know that leaving it a mess is the quick approach and that when you release, the system will still work just fine. But you also know that's not the right thing to do. You know leaving it this way will come back to bite you. For this exact reason, this is why we call these sorts of shortcuts (and many others) Technical Debt. You benefit from it now only to pay for it later.

The mobile development craze comes to Indy ALT.NET! We've got the three hottest platforms that are competing for consumers' money - iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile - and we'll compare and contrast application development for each of them, as well as their respective centralized application marketplaces and what it takes to submit your apps to them.
Pizza Holiday feast (complete with roast beast and more!) and chatter are at 5:30, and the technology discussions begin at 6PM.

Time for another fishbowl. W00t!
This time we're going to talk about security. And yes, you're right, that is COMPLETELY vague, that's kind of the point.
Ryan will moderate us, keep us on track, and provide us with other gentle prodding as necessary.
If you have any topics you'd like to talk about in particular, please, come with them in mind, or post them in the comments here.
Pizza will arrive around 5:30, and the fishbowl will start around 6:00.

Matt will give an overview of a few source control systems and what differentiates them.
Be prepared for discussion once the presentation is over too!Food (pizza) begins at about 5:30, so get here early!

Come join us at Scotty's for our administrative meeting and randomly inappropriate but so much fun geekery. Thursdays are Pint Nights which mean cheap draft beer ($2-2.50/pint). If you're 21+, you have interest in improving our group, and you get here before 6pm, then your first one is on me! There are also some great things on the menu you can order, but you're on your own with that.Proposed Agenda:

We're having another fishbowl. (Defn: Fishbowl)
We're talking all about agile practices (or not so agile, if you want to also)... post your ideas/topics in reply to this meeting and we'll try to get to them during the fishbowl. See you there!

Jon Fuller leads a discussion on Continuous Integration (CI). He'll give a quick intro to what it is and why it's important to you, as a developer and as an organization. Soon he and possibly some others will get into some demonstrations of various tools that many use to implement CI. Some such tools are CCRB and Rake, NAnt and CC.NET, MSBuild, and perhaps some others!

The ASP.NET MVC Framework has been an extremely anticipated release from Microsoft. Since it's so new, it is still an evolving piece of software. The MVC pattern it is based on, however, is established in many different frameworks that have already reached maturity. One such framework is Ruby on Rails.

This is the second of a 2-month ALT.Storm Series hosted by Indy ALT.NET. This second session of ALT.Storm will be a sequence of lightning talks given by various people who want to share an awesome code sample they have, teach you a neat coding technique, explain how they applied a pattern in an interesting way, or almost anything else. The sky is the limit and we want YOU to share what you have with us!

This is the first of a 2-month ALT.Storm Series hosted by Indy ALT.NET. The first session of ALT.Storm will be a sequence of lightning talks given by various people on their favorite utility applications. Have an amazing XML editor? What about a spectacular code generator? You know you have an excellent Visual Studio plugin (that you can show off and explain in 5 minutes)!

We decided conference calls weren't cutting it, and are now meeting face to face.
New folks are welcome to join us! Even if you have no desire to be an officer, we'd love to have your input and suggestions!

NEW LOCATION (this month only)Clojure is a functional programming language for the JVM that is designed to bring dynamic features and approachable concurrent programming to an established platform. It does so with parentheses, but you need not fear them (seriously, car and cdr don't even exist in Clojure). If you've ever wondered about Lisp or thought it was too hard or too impractical for work, Clojure may refresh Lisp in a package you want to check out. If you fear the day you have to multithread your C# app, you may be interested to know that Clojure provides a different, safer model in which you don't write locks.

This month, Brian Ball will be joining us to lead a discussion on functional programming with F#. F# is a typed functional programming language for the .NET platform. F# is already used by Microsoft for XBox analytics as well as many financial and scientific groups.

During the fishbowl meeting, discussion will take place around how project roles interact with each other. In the modified fishbowl setting, a Business Analyst, Project Manager, and at least one developer will discuss their functions in a software project and the challenges working with other roles. Be there to take part in the discussion!

Come join us for a discussion on Domain-Driven Design (DDD) on Thursday, September 18. Michael Brown will lead the discussion on a DDD architecture he created and his experiences using it with a team who had never used a DDD architecture before. Rather than focusing on code, this talk will look at Domain-Driven Design from a conceptual level. Some topics we will cover include:

On August 21 Jon Fuller will lead a discussion on Castle's MonoRail. You are encouraged to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the framework, and also Castle Windsor, as it will also be used during the discussion (but not as an active discussion point). Please come prepared with questions, information you would like to share, and concerns you have that can be discussed.

On June 19, Aaron Alexander, Sasha Kotlyar, and Dean Weber will lead an interactive group lab based around Mono. You are encouraged to spend some time familiarizing yourself with Mono, come prepared with questions, information you would like to share, and concerns you have that can be discussed.

Indy ALT.NET, a Technical Presentation of EntitySpaces 2008
The first meeting of the Indy ALT.NET community group will be May 15. Mike Griffin of EntitySpaces will be giving an in-depth technical presentation on EntitySpaces 2008 in Indianapolis. Pizza will be served and the presentation will start at 6pm. We expect this developer oriented technical presentation to go a couple of hours so drop in anytime after work. There will be Q&A time as well.